ABC Week 13: Is technology the solution for budget problems?

I read an article this week (http://bit.ly/d3IO7l) suggesting that using more digital textbooks and open-access materials may be a significant way to decrease the cost of textbooks.  Arne Duncan, the Education Secretary, believes that educational technology can reduce waste of money, time, and energy.  So the question is, is this true?  It depends on whether you look at it in the short term or the long term.  In the short term, it’s going to be a bit costly to get all the teachers appropriately trained in the technology and to acquire both the hardware and software.  Over the long term, however, it seems like it should be more cost effective, but you have to consider maintaining and updating the hardware and software as well as training teachers on the updated systems. It would be interesting to see some studies done on this so that we could see hard data on whether it would be cost effective or not.